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24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#4

Post by the_trapper »

helloworld wrote: post #3

I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess. Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?

You should check out Lazarus. It's basically open source Delphi and cross platform, write once, compile anywhere.

http://www.lazarus-ide.org

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#5

Post by dfox »

The article mentions that the binary size of the listbox example is significantly different. Well, we used to say that Delphi 1 is totally wasteful as the default empty project compiled into 39kB .exe, obviously full of bloat ;)

Edit: 39kB was nothing even in the 1995. But there was other more significant issue: if you went for all the database and line of bussines suport libraries you ended up with application that used more 3.5" floppy disks than contemporary Windows 3.1, one for your application and 7 additional for the redistribuable frameworks ;)

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#6

Post by systems »

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains)

I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following

Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive

Free-pascal is cute and probably productive, but there are way more intellectually and technically interesting options, even tcl/tk in my opinion is better intellectual and technical investment of time compare to free-pascal

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#7

Post by agumonkey »

protomyth wrote: post #2

Got to say, other than the font being much nicer now, some of those old screens look a whole lot better and easier to navigate. I miss buttons that look like buttons.

I have a weird feeling these days, that improvements didn't happen at the right place and that old GUI paradigms were just right and that if you knew how to leverage what a computer can do (mind you you could do sml and prolog back in the days) you wouldn't much fancier presentation..

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#8

Post by teilo »

systems wrote: post #6

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains) I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive Free-pascal i…

Looking at their price / feature matrix, they are running this platform like it's still 1999. The cheapest option is outrageous, and has no client/server DB support. So that means spending at least $3,600 (on sale!) for a usable development platform. Batshit crazy.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#9

Post by decebalus1 »

teilo wrote: post #8
systems wrote: post #6

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains) I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive Free-pascal i…

Looking at their price / feature matrix, they are running this platform like it's still 1999. The cheapest option is outrageous, and has no client/server DB support. So that means spending at least $3,600 (on sale!) for a usable development platform. Batshit crazy.

You're not the market for these tools. There are loads of enterprise systems built on top of this which need development and yes, they're still bought and sold like it's 1999. A lot of enterprise systems haven't been 'disrupted' yet and as long as Embarcadero is kicking then there is still a market for them. Oh, you've got this early 2000's system written in Delphi which you need to continue supporting, way too expensive to rewrite (think of the auditing and the requirement gathering, oh my.. this is gonna take years!) and now it needs to run on the latest version of Windows because of security constraints? Yup, you pay top dollar for that.
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